We have simply discussed the surveillance scandal enough. There's just nothing more we can say or do that will matter right now. When Americans here go vote in November, maybe they will remember. Maybe they won't. Either way, the horse is long since deceased and partially liquefied.
My suggestion may sound silly at first, but I think it serves a real need. We, as in Paul Graham, the moderators, and the community consensus, have twice now (first SOPA, then spying) decided that such-and-such political issue is important enough to the technical community that it deserves to be discussed and mentioned. When that happens, the the moderators can slightly change the board style to indicate that discussions relevant to the present crisis are acceptable -- maybe a black border and lettering on the Y symbol at the top-left. When the controversy ends, the board style changes back, and just this second signal is the important one: it means that we are done, it is over, if you want to keep discussing politics do it somewhere else.
I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to technical content, but the reality is that sometimes it may just not be feasible, here, Slashdot, or anywhere else. It is far better to have a system in place to keep such discussions under control than to pretend they won't happen at all. Because they have, more than once, and they will again. Occasional, specific discussions of events involving the tech community may be important simply because, in small amounts, they facilitate cohesion among the members by drawing our attention to things that may affect us as a whole. But the important part is occasional and specific.
Any community devoted to research and development, like HN, faces the challenge of living in the present while building the future. Our priority should always be the latter, even though we are part of the present world, and occasionally we find the present needs us. But the future needs us more.
The opposite is true.
For too long the minimal to zero reporting these issues have received in the majority of news outlets was met with an abundance of silence and indifference. Outside of a few communities on the net (and fewer offline), there hasn't been discussion on these issues. The Guardian finally breaks one story that manages to have legs for a week or two in the mainstream press and we're done here?
No. Just no.
>I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to technical content...
This has never been the case for HN, nor was it ever an ideal for HN:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
From the first line of the first question about submission guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
While most (read: not all) political posts are discouraged, the discussions around surveillance have been more technical here than anywhere, and it would be hard to conceive of a discussion with a political element being more on-topic and imperative than the discussions of late.
As someone brilliantly put it in a recent thread: I assume you have taken some space from your company's meetings for discussing the NSA, SOPA and related subjects every day?
I don't believe I ignored anything, and where I was responding to the poster and the discussion, I quoted him/her so it would be clear what points I was responding to.
If you have something specific to say, spell it out and maybe I can answer it for you.
Maybe more political discussion is needed, but Hacker News is not the place for this to happen. Where is the line drawn? Should we discuss alarming health issues like sodium consumption, GMOs, sweeteners? The military industry? The lobby complex? Violence and misery in Africa? Are these less important than the Prism scandal?
Exactly. Which is why I referenced the FAQ which states that most political discussion is discouraged and articulated precisely how and why this debate is not one of those times.
> The NSA discussion is way past the point where it's interesting to most people.
I think you meant "to me." Judging from the post rankings, frequency, and comment scores, people in this community are interested and engaged in this topic, -more than most. For now anyway.
>Maybe more political discussion is needed, but Hacker News is not the place for this to happen. Where is the line drawn? Should we discuss alarming health issues like sodium consumption, GMOs, sweeteners? The military industry? The lobby complex? Violence and misery in Africa? Are these less important than the Prism scandal?
As detailed in the FAQ, this is precisely the place for this to happen. Political posts are allowed, and if you can't see how discussion about surveillance software that taps the communications of the entire globe is on topic here, even with the (completely within-framework) political element, then I don't know what to tell you. The problem isn't HN and the other users though. I think you're just tired of seeing it and will be happier in a few more news cycles when it likely dies down like it always has.
Maybe. You also clearly have a bias towards finding these interesting, so it's a moot point.
Taking rankings at face value is not ideal; there is a feedback loop, political posts are likely to engage an audience that likes and upvotes them, and bring more users with that profile to the site. Taking that to the extreme, you could have porn links take over HN in just a few hours if you let them through. It's a matter of setting directions, not catering to everyone's needs.